Landscape design

Urban design

Californian Mannerism

Orsina Simona Pierini

A new book illustrated with Marvin Rand’s photos presents the Modernist architectural creations built from the 1930s onwards in the environs of Los Angeles

In 1955 Marcel Breuer published a volume illustrated in black-and-white with the significant title Sun and Shadow. After years of functionality and rationality, architecture had turned its attention to light again and the single-family home, as it is known in America, would be one of its most frequently tackled themes. These were simple houses in which internal and external spaces were intertwined and interspersed, and where living places of living are mixed up with circulation routes. They have porches, panes of ground glass and pergolas that cast sharp and highly contrasted lines of shadow on ample spaces. A few years earlier the magazine Arts & Architecture had launched its Case Study Houses programme. Advances in technology and prefabricated construction and experimentation with new materials had to shift their focus from the urgent needs of wartime to the new homes of the Californian middle class. Some famous projects from the finest architects a and designers around emerged in this context, such as the well-known house of Ray and Charles Eames, where home and work also embarked on a long process of hybridization that still, today, represents an interesting field of typological experimentation. These ways of working around the lightness and economy of elements of construction were also being investigated over the same period in Europe, although with very different results, as in the experimental houses of Jean Prouvé. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had moved to America before the war, and through his studies for the house with three patios, or for the suspended metal structure of the ‘house on a hill’, he had paved a path of design that his teaching at the IIT in Chicago would widen in terms of variation.

The upshot of all this was the birth of a genre of architecture that is still very clear and recognizable in its essential traits: with the use of modern materials like iron and glass, often set on a solid abutment of masonry, to define covered and uncovered spaces. This is a tradition which can still be traced in the architecture of Eduardo Souto de Moura. Industrial and office buildings, the representative premises of the new economy, would find a way to consolidate their image in this language. The handling of light and the clarity of the layouts, was always accompanied by research into sophisticated furnishings, and this was creating a kind of mannerism of the modern that soon came to be known as the International Style, after the title of a popular exhibition at the MoMA.

Richard Dorman, Beber Residence, Beverly Hills, 1960. (Courtesy the Estate of Marvin Rand). From the book “California Captured. Mid-Century Modern Architecture, Marvin Rand”, published by Phaidon.

The advantage of all forms of mannerism is that they are able to rely on a sound and familiar language with which to risk experimentation. The theme of residence and the detached house was undoubtedly one of the most widely tackled, allowing nature and space to be treated as fundamental elements in the design and creation of houses in which the contrast between the reality of the small scale and the opening up to the infinite added a new perception to a sense of domesticity. Clearly such an innovative state of affairs needed to be able to rely on a new means of communication.

Frank Gehry, Steeves Residence, Los Angeles, 1963. (Courtesy the Estate of Marvin Rand). From the book “California Captured. Mid-Century Modern Architecture, Marvin Rand”, published by Phaidon.

The success of the architectural magazines launched in the thirties would be based in part on the image that their photographers set about refining. Recently the “stage shots” of Julius Shulman have emerged from the archives, documenting the contrived process of creation of some of his famous photographs. Marvin Rand was a photographer who followed the history of Los Angeles right through this significant period, taking a series of pictures that have now been collected in a volume by Emily Bills, Sam Lubell and Pierluigi Serraino, California Captured. Mid-Century Modern Architecture, Marvin Rand, published by Phaidon. His images recount the life and the silence of those houses, as well as a new city made up of the buildings of a new business class, in which the transparency and the clarity of the structures, often made of metal, are a good representation of that new world.

Marvin Rand. (Courtesy Kwaku Alston, 2004). From the book “California Captured. Mid-Century Modern Architecture, Marvin Rand”, published by Phaidon.

A project conceived as an exhibition at the Onomatopoee space in Eindhoven...

30 August 2019

Founded in 1961 by Piera Peroni Abitare magazine has crossed the history of costume, architecture and design, international, following in its pages the evolution of our ways of life and how we inhabit places